| Locke Foundation Commentary on selected New Zealand happenings
Journalled by Dagny S Taggart |
For a long time now the Enviro-heroes have been telling us that the polar ice caps are melting. So we'd expect that if people were measuing the ice caps and noticing that they were getting thinner, these prophets of doom would tell us "ah yes, this confirms what we've been telling you all along."
But what happens if the icecap at the top of greenland is getting thicker? Well, these prophets of doom tell us, this proves what they've been saying all along. One thing's for sure. It confirms what a lot of people were thinking all along. I'm sure Michael Crichton got a chuckle or two out of this.
I want a change in government, no surprised there since I am politically classical liberal, yet a conservative Christian.
After much thought and uncertainty I have made my decision as to how I will vote and what my ideal new government will look like.
I want to see a National, ACT and United Future government.
This decision was difficult to settle on since I had to weigh up party philosophy and conscience voting track records against the likelihood of each of my preferred parties gaining seats and the new party lists of each party which are different to last election – this is important because a party with a good track record in voting last time around might not have a good track record next time if it has changed its party list.
Supporting National was easy as the choice for the major party who will lead the government is between Labour and National so it was contest.
Choosing between ACT and UF was harder as UF’s voting record on conscience issues is superior to ACT’s but ACT’s voting record on personal freedom and choice for families without the state intervening is superior to UF’s - both factors are vitally important for conservative Christians in New Zealand.
New Zealand is a morally corrupt nation. Our government slaughters 18,000 children every year, removes parental control over children and replaces it with state control on issues related to sex and reproduction, interferes far too much in family life, penalises honest hard work, penalises personal and familial and charitable responsibilities, penalises married and stable families and steals from us by taking too much tax and uses it to fund illegitimate pursuits that go beyond the scope of a just government. I could go on but in short our government does not acknowledge it must uphold God’s laws and as such is in error.
There is no quick fix to this situation, this is the state of our nation. United Future, Christian Heritage and Destiny NZ cannot change it even if they all crossed the threshold. So as Christians what should we do when we cast our votes tomorrow?
The first answer is VOTE! Christians must participate in democracy, it is part of being salt and light. Second think about making your vote count. Polling is not the be all and end all - parties like ACT always do better than the polls predict and the Greens tend to do worse, but it is an indicator so if your ideal party does not stand a chance consider making your vote count tomorrow and look at some other parties.
Take a good look at the candidates on the party lists, are they people who will uphold God’s laws if elected? Ideally we would elect Christians to parliament as if God is to use anyone within government, his own people you’d think would be most ideal.
However, think critically as some may claim to be Christians but sell out their principles to remain in power or they may fail to understand what a Christian government should look like or they are simply naive about politics and out of their depth when surrounded by anti-Christian politicians.
Christians do not believe in forced conversion, we believe in conversion by conviction of the holy spirit and persuasive argument by other Christians. In order for us to let our faith shine, to speak freely to persuade others we need to live in a society that allows us to practice our faith without restriction. There is no Christian in this country that I need to explain the importance of this too, we can all see where the current government is taking us and if we cannot we are fools.
So look at each party philosophy, is this a party that maximises personal freedom or is it a party that likes state control? Does this party allow parents choice as to how to educate their children without penalising them by making them pay for alternatives to state education twice? Does this party allow parents to educate their children in moral guidance and religious belief without state intervention? Does this party allow Christians to say un-PC things? Will Christians be allowed to express disagreement with homosexual conduct, abortion, sex-education in schools without being vilified, personally attacked, prosecuted for hate crimes? Will this party do what is right or allow its candidates to disagree even if it is not popular? Is it principled or will it try to ram through parliament unprincipled legislation? Finally, has this party noticed what is happening to the rights and freedoms of Christians in this country and does it care?
If our choice of good Christian politicians that can actually make it into parliament is limited, then the next best choice are politicians that are not Christians, may hold to values at odds with our own, but who will let us be Christians without us having to compromise our faith.
After careful consideration of the above I will give my electorate vote to National and my party vote to ACT.
I toyed with United Future a lot but at the end of the day they have altered their party list significantly, are far too statist and they lack principle in that they sold themselves to Labour and will not rule doing so out again - I would rather have seen a volatile and corrupt Labour Green govt that fell apart than a luke warm and lethally stable Labour UF govt that appeared too palatable to the nation.
With ACT, Stephen Franks and Muriel Newman are excellent MP’s with good voting records and while I have issues with Rodney Hide and Heather Roy, they are open to persuasion from reason and they support freedom for all including those they disagree with. If ACT win Epsom and get 3% party vote all 4 of these MP’s will make it to parliament and their support for freedom will nicely balance the statism within some parts of National and UF.
Labour hit the fan big time yesterday first with the Ombudsman forcing them to reveal costing papers they had tried to hide until after the election and second with the papers themselves.
One of the things that struck me amidst all of this was something Michael Laws said on Campbell live last night, he said that he'd had Helen on his radio show and she had stated that Labour had not had any costings done at all on their student loan policy. Then this morning I found this as I trawled the net:
Question Time on 2 August:
Dr Don Brash: Has the Prime Minister asked Treasury to forecast the long-term fiscal impact of her Government's proposed interest-free student loan policy; if not, how can she assure this House and New Zealanders that her gift to students in this election year will not be a noose around the neck of hard-working taxpayers for years to come?
Rt Hon HELEN CLARK: No, this is a Labour Party policy, not a Government one.
Lies, lies, lies.
The costing papers show that Treasury's figures were 3 times the size of Labour's public figures.
There is no need for me to go into all the ins and outs here, you would have to be a blockhead to be able to miss the ins and outs that are being yelled from every media outlet in the country and rightly so. All I can say is I knew Labour were corrupt liars anyway but now the whole country knows too and just in time for polling day.
Winston Peters is at it again. This time he's fighting for his survival against Tauranga's National Candidate Bob Clarkson. Apparently Bob is accused of making an unwanted sexual suggestion to a former contractor.
What's National's take on this? Well, Brash is backing his man, but he's not all that pleased with him. Apparently he talks about his testicles too much, saying "I don't want any candidates to be talking about their testicles to be quite frank."
Clarkson doesn't do much to help himself. When a 3 News reporter went to talk to him about his carry-on, he welcomed her by saying "I'm having to stand up, my crotch is so sore". Other National candidates present hung their heads and groaned. Winston's chances went up a notch.
It’s perhaps frustrating that after six weeks of careful consideration and prediction, the campaign has suddenly got surreal. Poll results over the last week have been so random as to suggest less influence by campaigns and impressions than by the mating dances of the lesser-spotted arboreal cave gerbils of the planet Merhek VI.
Or maybe by something even more peripheral to politics. The Exclusive Brethren don’t vote, don’t follow the news and contribute to public discourse primarily by supplying 60 Minutes with tearful ex-members to interview. Their coming out against Labour could be accounted for by such matters as prostitution law reform and civil unions, but what they’re doing wittering about the economy I don’t know. Maybe they’re less insular and single-minded than 60 Minutes would have us believe.
Whatever they think they’re up to, however, they’re not helping National. This incident has exposed in Brash a distinct lack of a quality many politicians complain about having to acquire, the ability to instantly give an eloquent, conclusive soundbite about anything that comes up. To be fair, there’s nobody among us hasn’t been confronted with a question we hadn’t anticipated and then only thought of a proper answer in bed that night. And had Helen Clark faced a situation like this, she’d have done what she always does – denied everything and then spanked John Campbell when he outed her after the election. Brash, by contrast, has been left looking like a dork again.
And worse, a dork with Christian mates. Between the recent unpleasantness surrounding Graham Capill and the fact that Destiny Church and TV3 are both largely incapable of doing anything more than squeaking about each other, the Christian right is terribly unfashionable at the moment. Now more than ever, New Zealanders want their politicians secular or, at least, professing goofy, contrived religions that justify getting stoned.
Clark, meanwhile, has kept certain people wrapped around her finger. In the Otago University Common Room last Monday, you couldn’t move for sweaty little undergraduates cheering her on and happily ripping down posters hung by our piddling campus opposition. ACT’s Gerry Eckoff tried something similar a few days later and merely ended up trading insults with the campus communist club who, he seemed to have forgotten, weren’t standing.
But the Otago University address, apparently entitled Don Brash: Your Part In His Downfall, continues Labour’s tack of behaving like an opposition, attacking opponents rather than discussing plans for the future. The Don/Key ads, referenced in Clark’s Otago speech, have become Labour’s core thrust. This is a predictable shift for a woman whose reaction to belatedly solid opposition last year was to call a press conference and snarl "bring it on". But in her position, neither side of the homily ‘oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them’ favours the tactic.
Consequently, I’d say neither Labour nor National – nor, really, any minor parties – deserve to win on Saturday. National’s campaign has been a long, flaccid damage control exercise, and Labour have consistently behaved like a bunch of petulant prefects (of course, that’s basically what their caucus is, but still…). And it’s difficult to confidently pick between them. Of course, however dumb it makes me look, an unpredictable election is vastly preferable to a predictable one. Still, if you want an inkling, my advice is to keep an eye on those gerbils.
Recently some Exclusive Brethren folk identified themselves as the ones responsible for a couple of recent anti-government fliers, one criticism the Labour Government over healthcare, and another flier criticising the Green party. They have said that there will be more material to come.
OK, so far, nothing too strange. What is strange, however, is the media's response to it. Every news network that I know of has called the fliers a "smear campaign," and the Green party Leader along with a Three News reporter has said that the actions are "not very Christian."
"Not very Christian"? Since when? Is there some Christian principle that says "thou shalt not criticise political parties"? What gives, who made Jeanette Fitzimons a theologian?
And can somebody explain this to me? Since when is criticising the Government or a political party a "smear" tactic? As far as I know, the term "smear campaign" is usually associatied with telling lies about people, whereas the claims made in the anti-governmen fliers appear to be demonstrably correct (e.g. that the Greens support the Kyoto protocol). People in the Labour Party have been saying that the National party has bad policies. Is that a smear campaign? If the National Party had criticised the healthcare practices under Labour, would that have been a smear campaign? It's as though the Greens and Labour think that absolutely any criticism of them is a "smear." Get over it!
Today Prime Minister Helen Clark visited the University of Otago. I was there. And wow.
As you'd expect, at the meeting were Labour supporters as well as people opposed to Labour. What I didn't expect to see - although I guess I probably should have - was the way the Labour supporters behaved. I'm not just talking about passers by who supported Labour. I'm talking about the people who were there as part of the event, wearing the Labour gear, holding the balloons and passing out the leaflets. Oh, and ripping anti-Labour material out of the hands of students, stealing belongings and running away with them, and Cabinet ministers assaulting women. It was a fiasco. I might undersand if these were your average loudmouth lefty students, but these were Helen's people, the ones who showed up with her! Maybe there's no difference?
I spoke to one of the women trying to physically rip materials from students' hands. I said, "Does your party support theft and vandalism to achieve its goals?" I was asking to make her stop, I didn't expect a reply. But I got one. She said, without flinching - "Yes!" I gotta admit, I didn't see that coming. Another of the men in red surrounding Helen did the same to another person, and when he asked this Labourite if he believed in free speech, the reponse was again, immediate and clear, "No I don't, and at least I'm honest about it." OK....
Way to go Labour, keep getting people like this working for you, it's magic for your public image! Or maybe this is the only kind of person who will work for you?
Let’s assume, entirely prematurely, that the country will end up being run by a colourless bean counter instead of an indignant student activist. She has, after all, been in charge for six years, and her attempts to shut her opposition up have many of the hallmarks of late-run panic.
Further to the point, they haven’t worked. Despite running what’s actually been a risky, presumptuous, flaccid campaign handicapped by the fact that their weakness play to Labour’s strengths, the Nats have pulled ahead. But Brash still needs help, and his choice of viable coalition partners is interesting in that, as everybody knows, he doesn’t have any. Does he?
I’m interested in this. The centre left, of course, have had their power structure just about sewn up since Labour recently discovered that – after all – the Greens might not be a pack of retrograde hippies, and the Greens recently discovered that – after all – Labour like hydrating worm farms with organic wholemeal water. However disingenuous this snuggling is, it does indicate that those parties understand MMP. National, historically, haven’t, which is part of what’s made goings-on on the right more fluid and therefore – for someone whose self-appointed task is pretending to see patterns in inherently unpredictable developments – more interesting.
For example, New Zealand First have a situation on their hands. Running in the risky four-point-something percent zone, and with Winston Peters’ hold on Tauranga starting to look more like a clammy death-grip than an assured grasp, they have to seriously entertain the possibility of defeat. Peters, being as he is such a reliable source of the carefully provoked verbal tension and shouting matches that the Sean Plunkett and Kim Hill seem to think reflect well on them, will have a hard time getting people to shut up about this. Besides, enough people share a mysteriously intense hatred of Peters that his defeat is a notion just entertaining enough to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Interesting developments are transpiring over Brash’s other elbow. The notion that ACT are fish food has been popular for about twelve months now, and they’ve always argued that they’ll have a late run. Honest. Just a bit longer. We promise. Any minute now.
Exactly how late this run was supposed to be might be apparent in that they didn’t see fit to officially launch their campaign until thirteen days before the election. Such bravado might cost them. But if they go down, it’ll be a pyrrhic victory for their opponents. ACT’s most valuable asset has always been their unfailing grasp of the purpose of the debating chamber as a venue to promulgate ideas, and their slump in the polls since the last election can be chiefly blamed on Brash nicking what few of their policies Helen Clark and Bill English hadn’t. Waitangi deadlines, welfare reform and tax cuts are all ACT notions. And if they lose, they can just revert to swindling people the old-fashioned way - in legal practice.
But it might not come to that. I’ve seen stats suggesting Rodney Hyde is pulling ahead in Epsom, so what he’ll manage with a full-scale campaign behind him is anybody’s guess.
And for all of Brash’s apparent ignorance of MMP, it may be that he understands the system after all. I recently heard a filthy rumor that he’ll pull his man out of Epsom at the last minute.
Christian Heritage didn't take long to respond to ACT courting their voters.
Ewen misunderstands liberalism. Classical Liberalism does not necessarily entail support for civil unions or prostitution. His comment follows.
Dagny
Hi Everyone
The following email from Stephen Franks has come to my attention. In response I would simply point out that Act has had NINE YEARS in Parliament and has not introduced a single member’s bill or any other policy initiative bill to affirm marriage in any way, or to rebuild respect for the sanctity of life.A significant proportion of their MPs have of course voted in accordance with their libertarian views to liberalize prostitution, and for the civil unions legislation.Its time for Christians to vote for what they believe in and put people with real conviction into Parliament.
Kind regards
Ewen McQueen
Leader,
Christian Heritage
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